Technical Glossary

The words Vector uses, in its own sense.

Scopes and Scope Kinds

Scope kind — what a tile measures. The Type row of the Scope Properties pane lists 29 kinds, Waveform to Timecode.
Scope family — the class a kind belongs to. 24 of the 29 measure a video frame, and Audio Meters, Surround Meters and Goniometer measure audio. Timecode shows a time, Text Display a line of text. Error Log and Flicker Heatmap are the QC kinds. The rest are readouts such as Min / Max, Channel Plot and 3D Color Cube.
Waveform family — Waveform, RGB Waveform, RGB Parade, YRGB Parade and YCbCr Parade, sharing Scale, Trace, Zoom and Pan.
Vectorscope family — Vectorscope and HML Balance. The split plot is a kind of its own.
Histogram family — Luma Histogram, RGB Histogram, Hue Histogram and Saturation Histogram, sharing Orientation, Scale and Fill.
Picture tools — Preview, Neutral, False Color, Gamut Scope and Skintone. Preview is the picture tile, with Aspect, Mask, Blue gun, Title safe and Thirds among its controls. See Audio and Timecode.
Source Signal — a kind Vector has retired, outside the 29 the Type row offers. Four of its monitoring tools — Zebras, Peaking, Chroma boost and Clip — are rows of the picture tile.

The Model

Source — an identity plus your preferences: a discovery address, never a display name. If you rename a camera on the network, its slot falls back to the offline slate, and every layout that used the old name is orphaned.
Widget — the Designer’s word for a box’s contents. Its buttons add a clock, a clock date, a studio clock, a logo, external audio bars, text and LTC timecode. Vector’s four pages have scope boxes alone.
Tile — Vector’s word for a box on the page. Some Designer labels call a box a Viewer (Delete Viewer, No viewer selected), and a scope’s sentence shows its slot as Measures the picture on that Viewer #.
Slot — a hole a feed goes in, one of five on every layout. The slot owns its window: Shape:, Zoom, Pan X and Pan Y belong to it, and its tiles show its feed.
Layout — the switchable unit: a named arrangement of boxes, set as fractions of a canvas with no z-order. Vector ships four pages: Colorist, DIT, QC and Broadcast.
Designer — the layout editor, at Menu → File → 🖼 Layout Designer panel. Drag a box there, resize it from a corner, and type a Position: and a Size:. A page’s scope tiles come with the page. Change what one measures on the Type row, and start a new page from a copy with Save As….

Color Words

Gamut — the primaries of a declared transfer, and half of an input transform. The gamma is the other half. The Gamut: row offers only the gamuts that pair with the log on screen, out of a catalogue of 21.
Transfer function — the curve between code values and light. The catalogue holds camera logs, ACES encodings, film-density curves and display transfers, and the Gamma: row offers only the transfers Vector can apply. The IRE and percentage axes use BT.1886 SDR, at a 100 cd/m² peak white.
Matrix — the decode matrix a frame claims for its luma and chroma. The QC panel measures its LUMA and BLANK rows under it, and a claim shows {primaries} / {transfer}, for example BT.709 / SDR (BT.1886).
IDT and ODT — an IDT is an input transform with a camera’s name, a gamma and a gamut together. An ODT is the display transform, and only a baked one applies. Both rows offer only what Vector can apply. The pickers show Choose a camera transform…, Choose a log… and Choose a gamut… until you declare something.
Look and LUT — a LUT file applied to a source. Vector uses a .cube and a CLF, decided from the file name alone, and refuses any other name with a sentence: {path} is {kind}. A look is a .cube or a CLF file. Export the look as one of those and load that file instead. Nothing is applied, and the source is left as it arrives. A look is a 3D table, a 1D curve, or a 1D curve in front of a 3D table. See Color Management and LUTs.

QC Words

Error log — Vector’s QC panel: a title and four rows, LUMA, GAMUT, BLACK and BLANK, for the current frame. Each row is a flag with a readout, in color. Two words are printed where a check did not run: OFF when its own switch is off, and NOT CHECKED when it examined no pixel.
Luma limits — the legality band on luma, two boxes joined by to, default 0.0 and 100.0. The LUMA row fails at 0.5 % or more of sampled pixels outside it, and the same pair gates Luma band only on the histograms.
Blanking — a line with no light on it. One blank row or one blank column fails the check.
PSE — photosensitive epilepsy analysis: how bright the picture is on a real screen, in cd/m², and whether it flashes too much. PSE analysis on the Error Log pane sets the display, the peak white, the flash level, the coverage and the flash rate.

Audio Words

Loudness — the K-weighted measurement of programme level, with momentary, short-term and integrated windows, a -23.0 LUFS target and a -1.0 dBTP true-peak ceiling. A meter on the LUFS scale shows it as four columns.
Level and surround meters — Audio Meters shows per-channel meters from -60 dBFS up, green to -18 dBFS, red from -6 dBFS, with Unity at -12, -14 or -20 dBFS and Peak hold on at stock. Surround Meters is the same for a 5.1, 7.1 or Quad layout, stock 5.1. Either kind can use the LUFS scale.
Goniometer — the stereo phase plot, where a mono programme collapses to a vertical line and a fully out-of-phase one to a horizontal line. The readout is PHASE +0.00, or PHASE — with no pairs.
Timecode — HH:MM:SS:FF on a fixed pitch. A drop-frame source shows a ; separator. The value is the bound source’s embedded count or a free-running clock.
LTC Timecode — the scope that shows live LTC timecode. Set its input once on Preferences ▸ Timecode.

Network Words

NDI® — Network Device Interface, the protocol Vector takes its network sources from. Sources are discovered and never typed. A snapshot runs every 2 s, Refresh Sources asks again, rows show {name} ({url}), and an empty result shows No NDI® sources found.
DeckLink — Blackmagic Design’s capture and output hardware. Its inputs merge into the same list as the network feeds, under Blackmagic Inputs ({n}) — Rescan, with none detected beneath it at zero, and come from the same places as any other source.
Discovery server — an NDI® server that finds sources where multicast cannot reach them. Menu → Sources → ⚙ Discovery Server Config opens NDI® Discovery Server Configuration, with Use Discovery Server, Save & Apply and Cancel.

NDI® is a trademark of the Vizrt Group.

DeckLink and UltraStudio are products by Blackmagic Design Pty. Ltd.